Termite Art: "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me."

Fractal Art: "no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement."
[source]

Starting with the question and answer going on at William Gibson's:

"Creator's block" sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer's block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. "It sprang whole and perfect from my brow" as opposed to "I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me". I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber's idea of "termite art".

Led to White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art by Manny Farber (1962) [emphasis not mine, but accepted]:

Most of the feckless, listless quality of today's art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.

Advanced painting has long been suffering from this burnt-out notion of a masterpiece - breaking away from its imprisoning conditions toward a suicidal improvisation, threatening to move nowhere and everywhere, niggling, omnivorous, ambitionless: yet, within the same picture, paying strict obeisance to the canvas edge and , without favoritism, the precious nature of every inch of allowable space. A classic example of this inertia is the Cezanne painting: in his indoorish works of the woods around Aix-en-Provence, a few spots of tingling, jarring excitement occur where he nibbles away at what he calls his "small sensation," the shifting of a tree trunk, the infinitesimal contests of complementary colors in a light accent of farmhouse wall. The rest of each canvas is a clogging weight-density-structure-polish amalgam associated with self-aggrandizing masterwork. As he moves away from the unique, personal vision that interests him, his painting turns ungiving and puzzling: a matter of balancing curves for his bunched-in composition, laminating the color, working the painting to the edge. Cezanne ironically left an expose of his dreary finishing work in terrifyingly honest watercolors, an occasional unfinished oil (the pinkish portrait of his wife in sunny, leafed-in patio), where he foregoes everything but his spotting fascination with minute interactions.

The idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical, sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter, from Motherwell to Andy Warhol. The private voice of Motherwell (the exciting drama in the meeting places between ambivalent shapes, the aromatic sensuality that comes from laying down thin sheets of cold, artfully cliché-ish, hedonistic color) is inevitably ruined by having to spread these small pleasures into great contained works. Thrown back constantly on unrewarding endeavors (filling vast egglike shapes, organizing a ten foot rectangle with its empty corners suggesting Siberian steppes in the coldest time of year), Motherwell ends up with appalling amounts of plasterish grandeur, a composition so huge and questionably painted that the delicate, electric contours seem to be crushing the shalelike matter inside. The special delight of each painting tycoon (De Kooning's saber-like dancing of forms; Warhol's minute embrace with the path of illustrator's pen line and block-print tone; James Dine's slog-footed brio, filling a stylized shape from stem to stern with one ungiving color) is usually squandered in pursuit of the continuity, harmony, involved in constructing a masterpiece. The painting, sculpture, assemblage becomes a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition; far inside are tiny pillows holding up the artist's signature, now turns into mannerism by the padding, lechery, faking required to combine today's esthetics with the components of traditional Great Art.

Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the first half of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

The most inclusive description of the art is that, termite-like, it feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement. Laurel and Hardy, in fact, in some of their most dyspeptic and funniest movies, like Hog Wild, contributed some fine parody of men who had read every "How to Succeed" book available; but, when it came to applying their knowledge, reverted instinctively to termite behavior.

One of the good termite performances (John Wayne's bemused cowboy in an unreal stage town inhabited by pallid repetitious actors whose chief trait is a powdered make-up) occurs in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Better Ford films have been marred by a phlegmatically solemn Irish personality that goes for rounded declamatory acting, silhouetted riders along the rim of a mountain with golden sunset behind them, and repetitions in which big bodies are scrambled together in a rhythmically curving Rosa Bonheurish composition. Wayne's acting is infected by a kind of hoboish spirit, sitting back on its haunches doing a bitter-amused counterpoint to the pale, neutral film life around him. In an Arizona town that is too placid, where the cactus was planted last night and nostalgically casted actors do a generalized drunkenness, cowardness, voraciousness, Wayne is the termite actor focusing only on a tiny present area, nibbling at it with engaging professionalism and a hipster sense of how to sit in a chair leaned against a wall, eye a flogging overactor (Lee Marvin). As he moves along at the pace of a tapeworm, Wayne leaves a path that is only bits of shrewd intramural acting -- a craggy face filled with bitterness, jealousy, a big body that idles luxuriantly, having long grown tired with roughhouse games played by old wrangler types like John Ford.

The best examples of termite art appear in places other than films, where the spotlight of culture is no where in evidence, so that the craftsmen can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke are and not caring what comes of it. The occasional newspaper column by a hard-work specialist caught up by an exciting event (Joe Alsop or Ted Lewis, during a presidential election), or a fireball technician reawakened during a pennant playoff that brings on stage his favorite villains (Dick Young); the TV production of The Iceman Cometh , with its great examples of slothful-buzzing acting by Myron McCormak, Jason Robards, et al.; the last few detective novels of Ross MacDonald and most of Raymond Chandler's ant-crawling verbosity and sober fact-pointing in the letters compiled years back in a slightly noticed book that is a fine running example of popular criticism; the TV debating of William Buckley, before he relinquished his tangential, counter-attacking skill and took to flying into propeller blades of issues, like James Meridith's Pale Miss-adventures.

From "Virtual Termites" by Lance Olson

Farber distinguishes between two kinds of art. The first, for which he holds contempt, is White Elephant Art, the sort that embraces the idea of a well-crafted, logical arena, incarnated in the films of Francois Truffaut. Proponents of this near-school produce tedious pieces reminiscent of Rube Goldberg's perpetual-motion machines that exude a sense of their own weight, structure, and status as masterworks. The second kind of art, which Farber advocates, is Termite Art. This is the sort that stands opposed to elite aesthetic culture, embraces freedom and multiplicity, is incarnated in the films of Laurel and Hardy. Proponents of this near-school produce pieces that gnaw away at their own boundaries, leaving little in their wake except traces of enthusiastic, assiduous, and messy endeavor.

Between the Folds: Origami and Paper Art | Notes and Selected Quotes

The Artisan

From the Website:

Origami may seem an unlikely medium for understanding and explaining the world. But around the globe, several fine artists and theoretical scientists are abandoning more conventional career paths to forge lives as modern-day paper folders. Through origami, these offbeat and provocative minds are reshaping ideas of creativity and revealing the relationship between art and science.

BETWEEN THE FOLDS chronicles 10 of their stories. Featuring interviews with and insights into the practice of these intrepid paper folders, the film opens with three of the world's foremost origami artists: a former sculptor in France who folds caricatures in paper rivaling the figures of Daumier and Picasso; a hyper-realist who walked away from a successful physics career to challenge the physics of a folded square instead; and an artisanal papermaker who folds impressionistic creations from the very same medium he makes from scratch.

The film then moves to less conventional artists, exploring concepts of minimalism, deconstruction, process and empiricism. Abstract artists emerge with a greater emphasis on concept, chopping at the fundamental roots of realism, which have long dominated traditional origami. The film also features advanced mathematicians and a remarkable scientist who received a MacArthur Genius Award for his computational origami research.

While debates ebb and flow on issues of folding technique, symbolism and purpose, this unique film shows how closely art and science are intertwined. The medium of paper folding—a simple blank, uncut square—emerges as a resounding metaphor for the creative potential for transformation in all of us.

Between the Folds is one of the more profound and enlightening documentaries I have seen in some time. (And I watch a lot of documentaries.) For at least a short while, you can find the entire film at PBS: Independent Lens.


What follows are a few clips from the film, some of my notes and a selection of quotations from the featured artists.

Much of the Beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

- Henri Matisse

The three themes that I find most interesting are:

• The challenge to create beauty with a limited medium
• The tension between between technical  proficiency and emotional meaning
• The relationship between the art and music

Yoshizawa

From the History:

Akira Yoshizawa, who died in 2005 at age 94, is considered one of the progenitors of modern origami. In the 1930s, he developed a system of folding patterns employing a set of symbols, arrows and diagrams. By the 1950s, these patterns were published and widely available, contributing to origami’s global reach and standardization. Yoshizawa and other origami masters formed local and international organizations publicizing the art.

Yoshizawa never sold a single one of his pieces. Sold soup for a living.

As I get older and older, I find that the big task is to put more white canvas in my work, to not play too many notes in music, to start to say what do I not want to put in this figure. To try to reduce it down to just a few lines and essences of what it is. That's a much tougher challenge to me now, trying to make something much more representational.  - Bernie Payton

Technique vs. Emotion

Yes, I think as I will get more and more old, I will take out technique and just keep emotional things with the paper. - Eric Joisel

The Postmodernist

Lots of people think about the reality of an elephant in origami. Does it look real? Does it look like an elephant? But it's a piece of paper. Of course, it can't look like an elephant. But people measure the detail. They measure the proportions to the real elephant to see if it is good or bad. And if it's got really long spindly legs, it can't be a good elephant. If it's got huge, huge, huge ears or just three legs or something, it can't be a good elephant. The elephants with four legs are better than the elephants with three legs. This is not just a problem in origami. This is a problem in painting. For example, you see a painting by Mondrian or something. Just colored squares and black lines. Is that better than, say, a painting of flowers? For many people it's not. I mean, it's the same in origami: that they would prefer to see an origami elephant than an origami blumpf. - Paul Jackson

 One Crease - Paul Jackson

The process of making is the point of it. The object looks good if the process felt good. This needs to be a kind of ballet. And this is what I try to with my work, to take it to an edge of something - because that's always where the interesting things happen. - Paul Jackson

Chris Palmer

A simple compostion is like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. It has a simple melody, a little bit of structure, not a lot going on, but it can be very elegant and nice - but simple. So, in the world of patterns, the hexagon grid or triangular grid is kind of like those real simple melodies. - Chris Palmer

 Chris Palmer at Origami USA

When you are putting a crease in a piece of paper, you are essentially changing the memory. - Eric Demaine

The Theory of Everything

In the beginning we didn't know what would be possible, then we tried to push the limits and, eventually, found that everything could be made, that you could make any shape that you want with straight sides just by folding with one straight cut. - Eric Demaine

Eric Demaine

Wallace Smith and those who crucify themselves on billboards in the quest for the Nietzschean solitude

Wandering around Henderson Books earlier today. Happened to see a stack of prints by none other than Wallace Smith. I remarked to the owner that Smith was about the last artist I would expect to find in a stack of miscellaneous prints.

Years ago, I purchased a copy of Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath by Ben Hecht, illustrations by Wallace Smith. At the time, I had only a notion of who Ben Hecht was. I bought to book solely on the power of Smith's illustrations.

After purchasing all the prints at Henderson's, I returned to my room and scanned them in. (A click on the images here will take you to a much larger image.) I also did a little research on the enigmatic Wallace Smith. Enjoy.

A novel of decadence and mystic existentialism, Fantazius Mallare is a story of a mad recluse—a genius sculptor and painter who is at war with reason. Rather than commit suicide, his doting madness dictates that he must revolt against all evidence of life that exists outside himself. He destroys all of his work and then seeks out a woman who will devote herself to his Omnipotence. What follows is a glorious trek into a horrifying enlightening insanity.

- From { feuilleton }: Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

Hecht’s book was illustrated by Wallace Smith (1888–1937) whose careful delineations seem to owe something to Harry Clarke. Smith didn’t spare the salacious details and artist and writer ended up being fined $1000 each when the books were seized. Book fanzine It Goes on the Shelf throws some interesting light on this incident in a review of a Hecht biography:

"…my interest in Hecht is mostly that he wrote a book, Fantazius Mallare, illustrated by Wallace Smith. Smith was said by Ronald Clyne to have gone to jail for the Mallare artwork, but apparently this was an exaggeration—he and Hecht were, however, fined $1000 each for “obscenity”; and $1000 was quite a lot of money in 1924. The particular points I was curious about were where the rest of the Wallace Smith artwork is? he could hardly have developed that style in the handful of drawings that have been published; and what happened to the copies of Fantazius Mallare seized by the US government? the book did not seem to be as scarce as would have been expected if they had seized even half of the 2000-copy edition. MacAdams was able to answer this last question to some extent—after the obscenity conviction, the publisher made another 2000 copies and sold them ‘under the counter’. However, MacAdams and I discovered that we both have copies of the original numbered edition, and that mine is #587 while his is #1900 and something—so what did the goverment seize?

"It should be noted that Hecht and Smith went to a great deal of trouble to have themselves convicted of obscenity. They had wanted to create a test case of the federal obscenity law and have a show trial in order to turn public opinion against it by ridicule. Hecht also intended to enter a million-dollar civil suit for defamation of character against John Sumner and his infamous Society for the Suppression of Vice if Sumner attacked his book. The famous Clarence Darrow was to have been their attorney. The plan was to send review copies of Fantazius Mallare to all of the literary lights of the time, and then have Darrow call these people as expert witnesses at the trial. Alas, the scheme foundered on the unforeseen pusillanimity of the literary establishment—only HL Mencken agreed to appear as a witness. In the end there was no trial because Hecht and Smith endered a plea of nolo contendere."

- From { feuilleton }: Fantazius Mallare and the Kingdom of Evil

The Dedication from Fantazius Mallare

This dark and wayward book is affectionately dedicated to my enemies- to the curious ones who take fanatic pride in disliking me; to the baffling ones who remain enthusiastically ignorant of my existence; to the moral ones upon whom Beauty exercises a lascivious and corrupting influence; to the moral ones who have relentlessly chased God out of their bedrooms; to the moral ones who cringe before Nature, who flatten themselves upon prayer rugs, who shut their eyes, stuff their ears, bind, gag and truss themselves and offer their mutilations to the idiot God they have invented (the Devil take them, I grow bored with laughing at them); to the anointed ones who identify their paranoic symptoms as virtues, who build altars upon complexes; to the anointed ones who have slain themselves and who stagger proudly into graves (God deliver Himself from their caress!); to the religious ones who wage bloody and tireless wars upon all who do not share their fear of life (Ah, what is God but a despairing refutation of Man?); to the solemn and successful ones who gesture with courteous disdain from the depth of their ornamental coffins (we are all cadavers but let us refrain from congratulating each other too courteously on the fact); to the prim ones who find their secret obscenities mirrored in every careless phrase, who read self accusation into the word sex; to the prim ones who wince adroitly in the hope of being mistaken for imbeciles; to the prim ones who fornicate apologetically (the Devil can-cans in their souls); to the cowardly ones who borrow their courage from Ideals which they forthwith defend with their useless lives; to the cowardly ones who adorn themselves with castrations (let this not be misunderstood); to the reformers- the psychopathic ones who publicly and shamelessly belabor their own unfortunate impulses; to the reformers (once again)- the psychopathic ones trying forever to drown their own obscene desires in ear-splitting prayers for their fellowman's welfare; to the reformers- the Freudian dervishes who masturbate with Purity Leagues, who achieve involved orgasms denouncing the depravities of others; to the reformers (patience, patience) the psychopathic ones who seek to vindicate their own sexual impotencies by padlocking the national vagina, who find relief for constipation in forbidding their neighbors the water closet (God forgives them, but not I); to the ostracizing ones who hurl excommunications upon all that is not part of their stupidity; to the ostracizing one who fraternize only with the worms inside their coffins (their anger is the caress incomparable); to the pious ones who, lacking the strength to please themselves, boast interminably to God of their weakness in denying themselves; to the idealistic ones who, unable to confound their neighbors with their own superiority, join causes in the hope of confounding each other with the superiority of their betters (involved, but I am not done with them); to the idealistic ones whose cowardice converts the suffering others into a mirror wherein stares wretchedly back at them a possible image of themselves; to the idealistic, ones who, frightened by this possible image of themselves, join Movements for the triumph of Love and Justice and the overthrow of Tyranny in the frantic hope of breaking the mirror; to the social ones who regard belching as the sin against the Holy Ghost, who enamel themselves with banalities, who repudiate contemptuously the existence of their bowels (Ah, these theologians of etiquette, these unctuous circumlocutors, a pock upon them); to the pure ones who masquerade excitedly as eunuchs and as wives of eunuchs (they have their excuses, of course, and who knows but the masquerade is somewhat unnecessary); to the pedantic ones who barricade themselves heroically behind their own belchings; to the smug ones who walk with their noses ecstatically buried in their own rectums (I have nothing against them, I swear); to the righteous ones who masturbate blissfully under the blankets of their perfections; to the righteous ones who finger each other in the choir loft (God forgive me if I ever succumb to one of them); to the critical ones who whoremonger on Parnassus; to the critical ones who befoul themselves in the Temples and point embitteredly at the Gods as the sources of their own odors (I will someday devote an entire dedication to critics); to the proud ones who urinate against the wind (they have never wetted me and I have nothing against them); to the cheerful ones who tirade viciously against all who do not wear their protective smirk; to the cheerful ones who spend their evenings bewailing my existence (the Devil pity them, not I); to the noble ones who advertise their secrets, who crucify themselves on billboards in the quest for the Nietzschean solitude; to the noble ones who pride themselves on their stolen finery; to the flagellating ones who go to the opera in hair shirts, who excite themselves with denials and who fornicate only on Fast Days; to the just ones who find compensation for their nose rings and sackcloth by hamstringing all who refuse to put them on -all who have committed the alluring sins from which their own cowardice fled; to the conservative ones who gnaw elatedly upon old bones and wither with malnutrition; to the conservative ones who snarl, yelp, whimper and grunt, who are the parasites of death; who choke themselves with their beards; to the timorous ones who vomit invective upon all that confuses them, who vituperate against all their non-existent intelligence cannot grasp; to the martyr ones who disembowel themselves on the battlefield, who crucify themselves upon their stupidities; to the serious ones who mistake the sleep of their senses and the snores of their intellect for enviable perfections; to the serious ones who suffocate gently in the boredom they create (God alone has time to laugh at them) to the virgin ones who tenaciously advertise their predicament; to the virgin ones who mourn themselves, who kneel before keyholes; to the holy ones who recommend themselves tirelessly and triumphantly to God (I haere never envied God His friends, nor He, mine perflaps); to the never clean ones who bathe publicly in the hysterias of the mob; to the never clean ones who pander for stupidity; to the intellectual ones who play solitaire with platitudes, who drag their classrooms around with them; to these and to many other abominations whom I apologize to for omitting, this inhospitable book, celebrating the dark mirth of Fantazius Mallare, is dedicated in the hope that their righteous eyes may never kindle with secret lusts nor their pious lips water erotically from its reading- in short in the hope that they may never encounter the ornamental phrases I have written and the ritualstic lines Wallace Smith has drawn in the pages that follow.

- From Fantazius Mallare

The entirety of Fantazius Mallare is available online (alas, without illustrations).

While the movie people basked in the limelight, Smith quietly sketched his way into a permanent place in Round-Up history. His drawings included a taut and tense depiction of a prototypically lean cowboy atop a horse. The cowboy, his hat flying away, leans back toward the bronco's high-kicking rear end and holds on with all the strength he can muster.

Round-Up organizers paid Smith $250 for the drawing, copyrighted it in 1925, and began using it as the event's logo. There's no estimating how many times since then the image has been reproduced or seen. Many decades later, the picture still symbolizes at a glance the essence of rodeo competition. To knowledgeable Round-Up fans, Smith's drawing and the words "Let 'er Buck!" are synonymous.

... Years before the 1924 Round-Up, Hearst newspapers dispatched Smith four times to cover wars in Mexico. He was embedded twice with forces of Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. In those days, journalists were less detached from story subjects, helping to explain why Villa awarded Smith the rank of colonel. He also rode with U.S. forces after Villa mounted an assault into New Mexico. At one point, Smith was captured and nearly executed by Mexican firing squad.

A book about William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American, where Smith worked for many years, described him as ruggedly handsome, flamboyant, and having a penchant for solving crimes that police couldn't. During the Mexico campaigns, while other correspondents wore army-issue clothes, Smith "had himself fitted with an officer's uniform that might have been the envy of a four-star general," wrote George Murray in his 1965 book The Madhouse on Madison Street.

During his assignments in Mexico, Smith closely observed the peasants for whom Villa waged war. In his 1923 book, The Little Tigress, he wrote sympathetically about their plight and brought them to life in his trademark stark black-and-white drawings.

Smith's run-in with obscenity laws culminated in Chicago six months before the 1924 Round-Up. He pleaded no contest to charges he had violated federal law with erotic drawings illustrating a bizarre 1922 novel, Fantazius Mallare, by fellow journalist and novelist Ben Hecht. Smith and Hecht were each fined $1,000. (In 1929 at the first-ever Academy Awards, Hecht won an Oscar for best original screenplay, a genre that Smith also would later add to his résumé.)

An apparent plan for celebrated lawyer Clarence Darrow to test the law's constitutionality using the case against Smith and Hecht never materialized, and the government seized Fantazius Mallare after two thousand and twenty-five copies were printed. After the nation's mores changed and such laws were relaxed, several publishers reissued the book starting in 1978. It was widely available in 2008.

Smith steered clear of sexually explicit drawings after his legal troubles, though his work was no less evocative, judging from "Let 'er Buck!" and similar art in his 1925 book Oregon Sketches. Based on an extended trip across the state, the book celebrated western life and its characters, including the Round-Up's buckaroos.

In 1928, Smith returned to the Round-Up and judged the Indian Beauty Pageant. He also made front-page newspaper drawings--this time for the East Oregonian--and did research in support of his campaign to defeat a proposed ban on bronco-busting at California rodeos.

For a time he owned a ranch in Oregon, though it isn't clear where. Smith apparently wrote there occasionally after relocating to Hollywood and embarking on his successful screenplay-writing career. His services were in high demand--he wrote or contributed to twenty-six screenplays, often enhancing them with detailed scene sketches. Smith's work included screen adaptations of his novels The Captain Hates the Sea and The Gay Desperado.

In 1935, Smith's novel Bessie Cotter about a prostitute's life on the streets of Chicago was judged indecent in England and the publisher fined the equivalent of $1,000. It was published a year earlier in the United States.

A newspaper colleague and friend, Harry Hansen, wrote of Smith in the 1923 book Midwest Portraits: "His salary was always big, his stories were always expansive, his expense account always leaned to the side of generosity to all men; he came and went in princely fashion, in olden times he might have preceded by a roll of drums."

Smith's flamboyance aside, he was congenial and warm--in Hansen's words "an emotional man, of great depressions and glad rejoicings, and yet a careful student of his fellows; a man who responds quickly and intensively to beauty in mountain and valley, in seashore and plain." Upon seeing Smith's drawing of black hands reaching out of quiet waters, Hansen said Carl Sandburg remarked: "That's poetry."

In 1937, Smith died suddenly of a heart attack. He was forty-eight.

- From The East Oregonian: Wallace Smith draws the symbol of Round-Up By Michael Bales

I Am As You Will Be: The Skeleton in Art

From the Press Release:

Cheim & Read is pleased to announce I Am As You Will Be, a group exhibition of more than thirty works which incorporate the skeleton as subject.

The works in this exhibition are inherently connected to a long history of the skeleton’s artistic representation, and are emblematic of human nature’s ongoing and understandably invested interest in mortality. In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, Tricot summarizes the history of this representation, as well as the skeleton’s appearance in science, literature and philosophy. Hidden but intrinsic to all living beings, the revealed skeleton has long been a harbinger of imminent death, directing the destinies of souls. It has appeared in its iconic, nightmarish uniform of black cape and scythe, has danced naked in a medieval jumble of bones (the “danse macabre”), and has waited patiently, skull-only, on the side table of a vanitas painting, with a vase of wilting flowers and a half-empty hour glass. Repeated, abstracted, and stylized through out history, the skeleton indicates the inevitable passing of time and ultimately mocks the fruitless hope for immortality.

Via the always enlightening gmtPlus 9 (-15)

Women in Art: All in the Eyes

Via WFMU's Beware of the Blog:

It is all over the place... but if you haven't seen this, you should. It was the shift into the Mona Lisa right there at the beginning, that lifting of the gaze outwards, that set the hook for me.